Commitments

by Barbara Delinsky

  She pressed her face to his chest. “Oh God.”

  “Don’t you want that?” His voice was husky this time, because the thought of having a baby with Sabrina was affecting him deeply.

  “You know I do. It’s the only thing that’s missing from my life.” She raised her head and met his gaze. “We’ve never talked about that. I’m not sure I’ve even admitted it to myself before now. It’s too painful, because if I start thinking of having a baby and then something happens, I’ll be broken. Totally broken.”

  He took her chin in his hand. “No, you won’t. We’re in this together. I won’t let that happen.”

  “You don’t know what it does—how it feels to have a child of your own flesh condemned like that.”

  “What happened before was a genetic mistake. It had to do with the biological mix between you and Nick, but I’m not Nick. The biological mix between us is different.”

  “What am I going to do?” she whispered. Her eyes were large, liquid, pleading.

  His fingers slid to cover the pulse at her neck, leaving his thumb behind to prop up her chin. “We need to see a doctor. Do you have faith in yours in New York?”

  “Not particularly.”

  He stroked her jaw with his thumb. “Then I’ll find another one. It’ll be easy enough. A few phone calls. There has to be someone who specializes in cases like these. He can tell us our options. I think there are tests they can run.”

  “And if they find something wrong?”

  “Then we abort.” He hugged her close, rocked her gently. “I don’t want anything to happen either, Sabrina. Believe me. I wouldn’t knowingly put you through that again, any more than I would knowingly put myself through it. We deserve happiness. We’ve earned it. If there aren’t any children in the cards for us, I can be perfectly happy living out my life, just the two of us. But if we can have kids—that’s the frosting on the cake. We’d make great kids, Sabrina. The farmhouse was made for them. We have the room, the money and the love.”

  His voice had dropped to a soothing croon that matched the gentle massage of his hand on her neck. And though the tension remained in her body, it wasn’t so acute as it had been moments before. Likewise, her voice was calmer.

  “I don’t understand how it happened.”

  He grinned against her temple. “Lots and lots of good, hard lovin’.”

  “But the IUD—”

  “Isn’t foolproof. No method of birth control is. Maybe someone’s tying to tell us something.”

  “Divine intervention?”

  “Well, we sure as hell wouldn’t have done it on our own.” He grew quiet thinking about that. “It would be poetic justice in a sense. One fluke of nature giving what another took away.”

  He let that thought mull in the air for a minute, then said quietly, “You wouldn’t let me go with you to see Nicky today.”

  “I had to work something out in my mind.”

  “Did you?”

  She took a breath against his chest, inhaling his scent for the strength it gave her. “No. I thought I’d see him and tell him he was going to have a little brother or sister, and then somehow he’d give me a sign that it was all right. That he didn’t mind, wouldn’t be jealous. That he wanted it and was happy.”

  “Sweetheart.”

  “He didn’t smile for me today. I’m not sure he even recognized me. That hurt.”

  “Was he fussy?”

  “No. Pretty quiet. I held him and talked to him. But something’s changing there, too. He’s not the same, not my own little boy anymore.” Her voice cracked, but she went on. “His body doesn’t feel the same. It’s getting bigger, heavier. And that baby smell is gone.” She swallowed the knot in her throat. “He’s more the Greens’ than mine. It’s like I’ve lost him completely.”

  “You haven’t. You never will. You’re his mother. I’d put money on the fact that when you hold him, he knows. Something in his subconscious clicks. I’ve seen it, sweetheart. I’ve seen him fussing, then you pick him up and he quiets down. It’ll probably always be that way.”

  After a minute, she gave a conceding shrug. “But what’s happening to me? I feel removed from him.”

  “Maybe you’re needing to make a break. Maybe this is a natural psychological step to help you make that break. Every mother has to let go sooner or later. Every child gets bigger and heavier. No kid goes off to school smelling like baby lotion. If Nicky had been perfectly normal, he’d be in nursery school now, then kindergarten in another year. You’d be letting go, anyway.”

  He held her silently for several minutes before daring to go on. “You’d also be having a second child, if you hadn’t already. And Nicky would be jealous, like most other little big brothers. You can’t feel guilty about wanting another child, Sabrina. It’s not a question of replacing Nicky, because he’ll always have a special place in your heart—and mine, too—and that’s how it should be. But he’d want to have a brother or sister. If he could communicate with you, he’d tell you that.”

  Sabrina’s body had grown progressively lax. Now almost at the point of limpness, she was quiet against Derek, letting him share her physical weight just as he’d done the weight that was burdening her mind.

  He shifted his head just enough so that he could see her face. “Still here?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Am I making any sense?”

  “You always do. But fears aren’t always rational. Know what my worst one is?”

  He shook his head.

  “Failing again. Only this time it would be you I’d let down—”

  Derek interrupted her to growl, “The only time you let me down is when you say things like that, because it’s dumb. Just dumb. You may legitimately feel that way, but it’s dumb. Do you think you made this child in a vacuum? Did you make Nicky in one? It takes a man and a woman to make a baby. Why in the hell should you blame yourself when a full half of the responsibility is mine? But I won’t take the blame. Birth defects are genetic mistakes over which we have absolutely no control, and I will not take the blame for something like that. It’s insane. Self-defeating.”

  Only when he finished speaking did he realize that his grip on Sabrina was as harsh as his tone had been. Feeling immediate remorse, he relaxed both, then soothed her by rubbing his hands on her back and saying gently, “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I don’t mean to sound angry, but it upsets me when you talk that way. You have courage. That was one of the things I fell in love with. You had the guts to visit me in prison when few other people would. You had the guts to find a proper placement for Nicky when you realized you couldn’t handle his care yourself. You had the guts to buy this place and fix it up. And you had the guts to marry me.”

  “No guts involved there,” she murmured. “I’m a sucker for men with dimples.”

  “I don’t have dimples.”

  “Grooves, then. They’re there in your cheeks when you smile a certain way. I like them.”

  He was pleased to hear that, if a little bemused by the fact that she was thinking of the grooves in his cheeks when they were in the midst of a heavy discussion. At least, he was.

  “The issue here, Sabrina, is strength. Inner strength. Courage. When I was behind bars, I had times of utter depression when the only future I could envision for myself was one in which I faded totally into the woodwork. The thing that saved me, I suppose, was my anger, and I do believe that was a strength. I made up my mind that I was going to make it, if for no other reason than to get Greer; and I won’t apologize for that, because the alternative was to accept defeat and wither into the corner. I have never in my life been willing to accept defeat.”

  He paused to let Sabrina comment. When she didn’t, he squeezed her lightly. “Are you with me?”

  “Mmm,” she hummed softly.

  “We’re scrappers, you and I. When we want something in life, we go after it. What you have to decide is whether you want this baby enough to do that. No test, no doctor is going to be able to tell yo
u conclusively that the baby will be born perfect. They may be able to redefine the odds, but they can’t guarantee a thing.”

  Again he paused. Again Sabrina was silent. This time he drew back and looked down at her. Her eyes were closed, her breathing even. It seemed that, heavy discussion or not, his wife had fallen asleep.

  The love he felt for her surged within him, welling up from his heart into his throat until he had to work at a swallow. He reshaped his arms to hold her more gently, more aware than ever that she was to be cherished. Sabrina—and his child. His gaze crept over the gossamer silk of her nightgown to her breasts, then her belly, and again his throat grew tight. If he could have Sabrina … and a child … for a man who a mere year before had been wallowing in the dregs of life it was … incredible.

  He’d come a long way since then, and it was largely Sabrina’s doing. From the very first, she’d had faith in him. Even when he’d been at his lowest, when he felt every bit the convict, then the ex-convict, she’d treated him like a man worthy of respect. And love. She’d loved him then. She loved him now. And she carried his baby. Not so long ago, he’d have thought himself unworthy of it. By believing in him, Sabrina had made him believe in himself.

  Lowering his head over hers, he closed his eyes and hugged her. His arms trembled when he wouldn’t let them squeeze her as tightly as they wanted, but he didn’t want to wake her. She needed the sleep. He supposed it had something to do with her not sleeping earlier, or the probability that the pregnancy was making demands, or the possibility that, God forbid, she’d found his little speech boring. But what he really wanted to think was that having unburdened herself, having shared the news of her pregnancy after worrying about it alone for so long, she felt better.

  Curled in his arms, with her hair wild and her gown caressing her gentle curves, she was the flower child he’d thought her the very first time they’d met. She had come a long way shouldering a heavy load. With it removed, she’d allowed herself to sleep.

  * * *

  Sabrina liked the doctor that Derek found. It was a woman, for one thing, which made Sabrina feel that she would be more understanding of the emotions involved in the situation. For another thing, she spent nearly an hour with them, taking in-depth medical histories, asking question after question of them both, as if she had no other case as important as this.

  She pronounced Sabrina seven weeks pregnant. As for how it had happened, she looked from Sabrina to Derek and back, grinned, and said that whatever they did to each other had, apparently, resulted in heightened fertility, which was the most probable explanation for their little quirk of fate. Regarding the IUD itself, she declared that there was more to be risked by attempting to remove it than by leaving it be, and that it would simply deliver itself along with the baby in due course. She felt that amniocentesis was in order, but advised them that not only would they have to wait until after the first trimester for the test to be done, but that it would be some weeks after that before the results came through. Sensing Sabrina’s discouragement, she spent the rest of the visit presenting a remarkably optimistic picture of the chances for the baby to be perfect.

  Leaving her office on that positive note, they spent the afternoon in the Museum of Natural History. There was something about the antiquity of the place that put things into perspective. The antiquity and the scope. In comparison, their lives and that of a child they might spawn were insignificant happenings.

  They didn’t talk about the baby. They didn’t talk about much, just walked from room to room, sitting occasionally to rest, arms linked at all times.

  That night, looking out over the Hudson from Sabrina’s Manhattan loft after they’d returned from dinner at Lutèce, Derek said something that captured Sabrina’s dilemma in a nutshell.

  “A while ago, you told me that you didn’t know who you were—who you were or where you were going. I like to think that’s changed, but I don’t know for sure. Has it?”

  She was quiet for several minutes, following the lights of a barge as it worked its way through the water. “Yes and no. I’m your wife. As a source of identity, I like that. I’m going where you’re going, where we’re going. As for me as a writer, you know what I want. I’m not there yet. I won’t be until my next book is published, and that may be a long way off.”

  “Does it bother you—the delay?”

  “No. I thought it would, but it doesn’t.” She gave him a tentative smile. “You take up so much of my mind-time that I haven’t an awful lot to spare. Besides, if it bothered me, I’d do something about it. There are other stories I could write. The list I started at the beginning of the year has grown pretty big in the last two months. Some of the subjects may be passé by the time I get around to doing anything, but others are timeless. They’ll be there, waiting, whenever I’m ready.”

  Leaning sideways against the glass, Derek took in her elegance, not for the first time that evening. She wore a red sequined sheath that fell in a straight line to a spot just above her knees. Encased in nylon of the sheerest matching red, her slender legs were perfect for the dress, as were the high-heeled black patent leather shoes she wore. She’d gathered her hair loosely at the top of her head in a style that set off the delicacy of her features even as it played up her onyx earrings and necklace and the overall sophistication of her attire.

  But it wasn’t only her attire that he admired. It was the alabaster hue of her skin, the translucence of the pink resting high on her cheeks, the luminosity of her pale green eyes. And her scent—he adored her scent. It wasn’t slick, spicy or exotic. The jasmine she rubbed into her skin enveloped her in the wispiest fragrant cloud.

  She was stunning, he thought. Beside her he felt perfectly plain in his dark suit, dress shirt and polished shoes—the beast to her beauty. And even then she seemed not to notice. She looked at him as though he were a prince.

  Some prince. An ex-con. A man out for revenge.

  “Who are you?” he heard himself whisper in awe.

  She didn’t take in the awe, or if she did, she was unaffected by it. Her mind was on the question, as it related to the events of that day. “I am,” she said with a sad sigh, “a dreamer. I want the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But does it exist?” she asked, raising anguished eyes to his. “And if so, what is the price to be paid to reach it?”

  * * *

  There were no answers to her questions, and once back in Vermont, Sabrina found her greatest salvation in work. When she was busy, she didn’t think about the pot of gold, didn’t think about the baby she wanted so badly but was terrified to bear.

  Though he could clearly see what she was doing, Derek was stymied. He could only pamper her so much before she accused him of smothering her. Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t—he didn’t want to mention the baby lest he bring that look of fear to her eyes, yet in avoiding the subject he let her get away with doing far more work than he wanted her to do.

  His friends in the barn didn’t help his cause. They had discovered that Sabrina could take their notes and write them up in a fraction of the time they’d have taken, and since she was always there, always willing to work, they took full advantage of her skills.

  In that, too, Derek was torn. Sabrina did better when she worked. Her frame of mind was better. She was obviously pleased with what she accomplished. But she got less sleep—absolutely refused to rest during the day—and seemed to subsist on bi-hourly mini-meals of crackers, canned peaches and yogurt.

  More than once, Derek called the doctor in New York. Though she assured him that Sabrina was strong and that work wouldn’t hurt, particularly since little of it was physical, he continued to worry.

  The only time when he felt he had any control over her was when they were working on his case. They had taken to keeping those particular notes and papers in the farmhouse’s small second-floor den whose walls were lined with the built-in bookshelves that Sabrina had painstakingly stripped and restained. The room was cozy and private. It was furnishe
d with a long, comfortable leather sofa and a single matching chair, and it was there that they hashed and rehashed the Ballantine matter.

  Only there, and under the guise of his own hunger, could Derek ply Sabrina with food. Likewise, under the guise of his own fatigue, he could coax her into napping. And there, more than once, they made love, which was the only time Derek knew for sure what was on her mind.

  * * *

  The Ides of March found Sabrina and Derek in Washington again, this time combing the ranks of the city’s private investigators for one who may have been hired by Greer to get concrete proof that Lloyd Ballantine had had at least one extramarital affair.

  “If women were Ballantine’s weakness,” Derek explained, “and Greer used it against him, he’d had to have proof. Something hard and condemning.”

  From agency to agency they went with Ballantine’s picture in hand, but that was still the only picture they’d seen when they returned to Vermont. Derek was far from defeated. He had other avenues to follow and might have done so immediately had he not wanted to give Sabrina a rest. She was still unusually tired and suffering from regular nausea, for which she took nothing. He agreed with her in that, as did the doctor, who hadn’t pushed pills other than vitamins. None of them wanted to introduce anything to her system that, in even the remotest possible instance, could cause harm.

  They didn’t tell anyone that Sabrina was pregnant. If the test turned up a problem, they were prepared to terminate the pregnancy—in which case friends and family would only complicate the issue. Unfortunately, since the test couldn’t be run until Sabrina was three months pregnant, which was nearly a month off, and since the results wouldn’t be in for nearly six weeks after that, she could well be showing. Fortunately, her wardrobe was filled with long and concealing sweaters, and if that didn’t work, she was prepared to take a page from Annie-Fitz’s book and dress in multiple loose layers to hide the bulge.

  For all practical purposes, nothing in their lives had changed. Wary of making an emotional commitment to a child that might never be, they talked about everything but that; and if there were periods of tension when neither of them would express his fears, they gave themselves no choice but to cope.